NEW RULES THIS FALL

As many of you may know, there are substantial rule differences between Canada flag, USA flag, NFL flag, and IFAF (International Federation of American Football) flag.

In 2026 Football Canada determined that the appropriate approach to ensure development for players, coaches and athletes that would allow them the best opportunities for growth toward World and Olympic competition would be to adopt IFAF rules for flag football, which will be used at the 2028 Olympics. These rules were used for all Football Canada National and Regional comeptitons this year.

For our Manitoba Flag Leagues, we have decided that the sooner we adopt the new rules, the sooner all of our participants (players, coaches and officials) will be comfortable and ready for flag tournaments or events in the future.

We are scheduling multiple dates for coach training sessions that deal specifically with the rule changes.  These will be mandatory for all coaches participating in the Fall and/or Winter NFL leagues.  Coaches not coaching until Spring will also be able to attend this training but not required until Spring preseason kickoff.

You can download or review the IFAF FLAG RULEBOOK here:

SINGLE COED TIERS FOR INDOOR SEASONS

Any of you that have been coaching for awhile understand the difficulty we have been having in our attempts to keep competition as close as possible with teams that are sometimes at completely different skill levels and experience.

We will be working to get criteria in place which will clearly have teams in the divisions or tiers that they should be in for the Spring 2027 season.  However, with limited field time and space during the indoor seasons, it means we can accommodate fewer teams.

The schedule will be random so every team should have an equal mix of competition.
Teams will be grouped into smaller divisions for playoffs to ensure more competitive games.